We are Young
by junmilk
Summary: They all meet, dying. modern!au at hospital, trigger warnings on inside. Yatori
1. Chapter One: Innocence be Damned

**a/n: hello there lovely readers, please enjoy my fic, and remember that your reviews are like 5-yen coins for me! *throws you love***

**tw; mentions of abuse, possible substance abuse later, depression**

**disclaimer: I do not own Noragami. **

* * *

Hiyori fidgets on the hospital bed, pink eyes flitting around her room, as the doctor's check her temperature once again to scribble additional notes on his clipboard.

"You must remember not to strain yourself, Iki Hiyori-san." the doctor says as he tucks his clipboard under his arm. "Your condition is a very fragile one, and we need to make sure what's wrong with you."

It wasn't like the doctor was trying to lie her with malice; he really doesn't know. Hiyori grits her teeth into a painful smile before nodding; she's afraid of what she'll say if she opens her mouth.

Her fainting spells are becoming increasingly more frequent from once or twice a month to almost everyday without fail, and she always wakes up either sprawled out on the floor or in a hospital or her bed. She doesn't remember what prompts her fainting either. One moment she could be dreaming about the moves that lead up to Tono's victory of the other day as she walks home from school with her friends, the next moment she'd find herself in her bed with her friends' crying faces hovering around her and two hours has passed.

"I understand." she finally speaks, calm and unwavering, and the doctor nods his approval.

"You'll stay here for a couple more nights so we can monitor your health."

The door shuts and Hiyori stares at the wood before collapsing on the hospital bed, messing up her school uniform slightly.

Clutching the thin pillow, she scrunches up her eyes tightly. She's read a lot into her family's medical history and there's been a mentioning of the frequent dizziness, that leads to great pain, and death—

Hiyori stops herself there. She told herself not to think about it, and that it was just nothing.

She clenches her grip on the inadequate pillow because she's so scared, no, she's terrified, and she can't do anything about it, and it's eating her away.

She wants to live, but Hiyori realizes that by wanting to live it, it's condemning her to a more painful fate.

Hiyori hopes no one hears her anguished shrieks through the tear soaked pillow.

Damn it.

* * *

Yato gazes out of the hospital window with a white, cylindrical roll of death rolled between his chapped lips, wondering if he should use his lighter.

He never does, except for one time, and he never uses it again.

Why he keeps the damn thing, he still doesn't know, but he reasons with himself that it's only out of habit that it isn't in the trash, and there isn't a gram of sentimental value for the lighter.

In the entirety of his life, so far, he watches the people around him grow up to be something, watches them light their candles that allowed them to shine brightly for many years.

And when he, the foolish person that he was, was given the chance to choose a candle, he had chosen the candle that burned brightest, but died quickest.

His heady, puerile laughs only come to a halt when he's taken away and was stuck at that place.

That place, what Yato calls it, is a rehabilitation center meant to discipline "juvenile delinquents" like Yato, he snorts at the thought. It was more like a jailhouse, Yato thinks as he drums his fingers against the sill, there's nothing rehabilitating about it— it's just a more contained way to have fights because a lot of the kids there were causing trouble in the cities. Oh, and the monitors were ruthless.

That place was hell, he thinks, but at least it was away from Father and her, and of course, they had to be the ones to withdraw him after two weeks of the place. The cold light hadn't left his bright blue eyes, but Yato still hasn't smiled for a long time. He honestly forgot how to.

Back at school, he was the ruthless jokester who sometimes ditches several days of school to go finish his father's "dirty work" because how had he said it back then?

"Father's hands are never to be dirty!"

Yato barks out a bitter laugh and he doesn't care that the unlit cigarette falls from his mouth, doesn't care if it hits somebody who walks right there, doesn't care what anyone thinks, doesn't care anymore, doesn't care that a lone tear is running down his cheek, doesn't care, doesn't care—

Damn it.

* * *

The fluorescent light casts a white but soft glow around the room when Yukine stirs and opens his eyes, and the nurse monitoring his heart rate looks up.

"Oh good, you're awake," she says, and Yukine can only look at her in response.

He has half a mind to tell her that there's nothing good about being awake when you feel like crap, until he looks at the new violet and yellow splotches on his pale, thin arms. It looks like a child had dipped their hands in bruise colored paints and unceremoniously smears them over the blank, white canvas of his body.

How long was I out? Yukine's vision focuses a little more and he gazes up at the ceiling.

"You've been out for three days." the nurse scribbles in some figures on her clipboard and readjusts the equipment around him. She didn't hear his thoughts, she's just making conversation with him. Yukine's gaze slides back down from the ceiling to the nurse as she fixes the vase of flowers on his table. He doesn't think anyone's ever visited him in a hospital, so it must have been there before.

Three days, Yukine winces. So it's gotten worse, he thinks. He remembers now. His father was drunk again, and he couldn't find anywhere to hide this time.

"It's not my business to pry," the nurse begins.

Then don't pry. Yukine thinks tiredly. People always say this when they want to get into other people's businesses.

"But you should get help and leave them or else."

Or else the next time, you won't be so lucky. Yukine hears that in her tone, and he wants to, he really does want to leave his dad, but

Yukine's orange eyes lock onto the nurse's and he opens his mouth.

"Where do I go if I do?" his voice is wispy, sort of croaky, and to be honest he didn't expect that tinge of desperation in his voice.

She hesitates, her hand hovering on the door, and Yukine feels tired, very tired.

"I don't know."

Yukine hears that a lot too. And frankly, he's just too tired of everything. The door shuts, and his eyelids are slipping shut again.

Something wet runs down his cheek.

Damn it.

* * *

a/n: I hope you've enjoyed it so far, and there will be Yatori next chapter, so until then! I mean, may our fates intertwine! (Yukine, kill me now)

p.s. 5-yens in reviews!


	2. Chapter Two: 2 am

**a/n: I lied there is no yatori in this chapter.**

* * *

It's two a.m, Hiyori lets out a frustrated groan when she turns on her phone to check the time after many futile attempts to sleep.

Sleep would have (albeit temporarily) helped her forget the words of her doctor and more importantly and hopefully, numb the little voice in her head that darkens her mind just for a little amount of time.

Hiyori rolls onto her back, staring at the square ceiling tiles. She's lost count of a long time ago during that night, but whether it was count of the number of tiles above her or the amount of times she tossed and turned on her bed, she doesn't really know.

She's dying, she just doesn't know when, and there is no cure for her family's generic illness.

To be diagnosed at an age so young meant that Hiyori's illness had taken on a greater magnitude of degeneration of her body. She's doesn't have much time to live, and what's more Hiyori is still dangling on that little sliver that she still has the chance to live, to survive.

A two-percent chance of living doesn't guarantee much.

So her reason hates her heart for believing in that small percentage, and Hiyori hates herself for having hope, for scrabbling blindly for a thread, anything, to pull her out of her drowning haze.

Who ever knew that disappointment could hurt so much, Hiyori muses and sits up to wrap her blankets tightly around her body.

What was that quote again? The bigger they come, the harder they fall.

In Hiyori's case, the harder she fights, the more pain she will suffer when she loses her battle. She has a feeling that "pain" is an understatement.

Because when your hope is extinguished, you will fall deeper into despair than those who succumbed to the despair much earlier.

Hiyori stands up abruptly, blankets pooling around her waist on her bed, and starts to the door.

She needs to leave this place, she doesn't know how, but she will, somehow.

* * *

Yato rubs his eyes in a resigned fashion before he leans on the window sill, staring up at the tiny dots of white against the inky dark of the sky.

Normally, he'd let himself succumb to the ignorant bliss arms of sleep, but the haunt of old memories is unforgiving.

This time, he remembered Ebisu.

Ebisu, his first and closest friend, was beaten horribly for tripping on the feet of a guard while he was animatedly talking about something to Yato.

Something within Yato snapped. All that he can remember was surge of power, and a red vision.

The guard was dead at his feet, slash marks adorned over the entire body, and the inhabitants around them are staring in absolute horror at the end scene.

But all Yato could see is Ebisu, who even with the purple swelling around his face had eyes are wide and innocent, staring directly at Yato's eyes.

They were still on him, when Yato willingly let himself get dragged away.

Yato was transferred to a different unit. And a week later, he was taken out of the institute by Father and her.

He never had the chance to say goodbye to Ebisu.

Yato gazes out into the night from his window, how many people are staring up at the same stars with regret as deep as his?

He closes the curtains, closes the view of the stars, and his electric blue eyes slide to the red LCD display of the clock on the nightstand besides his bed.

Two A.M.

Yato lets out a huff of a laugh from his mouth and scratches the back of his head.

Memories are truly the worst and permanent stains that you can have, truly; whoever said that time will dull the worst of memories obviously does not know that was bullshit.

He turns to the door, and makes his way over it. He doesn't know where he's going, just out of the confines of this room where the gloom of memories festers best.

* * *

When Yukine's eyes flutter to consciousness, as soon as he opens his eyes, he immediately wishes he hadn't opened them.

The faint eerie green light glowing from the crack underneath the door creates nothing but ominous shadows around the room.

_It's dark_, he thinks, squeezing his eyes and pursing his lips tightly, and the thought no sooner registers in his head before he feels his throat constrict.

As he tries to calm his racing heart through deep but shaky breaths, he vividly recalls the dark, a place where he desperately tries to calm his shortened gasps of terror as he hides from his father's drunken rage.

He never had the chance to overcome his fear, and what had started as a fear from his childhood became his nightmares of now.

Supposedly, hiding in the shadows that cloaked him from his intoxicated father should have allowed Yukine to find some type of inner peace within the shade he had hidden himself in; on the contrary, being the lightlessness seemed to magnify the endless shouts of his inebriated father and the fear within him to an even greater degree.

Yukine grips his covers tightly, and his breaths are coming out into short, erratic gasps.

The feeling of dark back then is the same as it is now: cold, creeping, and unrelenting, and Yukine could feel himself tiring.

He was slipping into the expanse of his fear, he needs a distraction, _anything_, he thinks, to stop him from getting dragged into the pull—

The shuffling of feet besides his door yanks Yukine out of his panic attack.

It's two a.m., Yukine notes, his fear replaced by curiosity, who else is awake out there?

He gingerly slides off his bed, wincing at the frigidity of the tile floor the moment his toes brush the ground but he tells himself he prefers walking on the cold more than being alone in the shadows as he grasps the door handle.

He patters after the figure in the hall, away from the pitch blackness of his room.

* * *

**a/n: I've been out studying for ap tests, and then when I came back I found out people liked my fic? Thank you for appreciating my writing, and your reviews mean a lot to me (as much as 5-yen coins are to Yato!).**

**So thanks so much for supporting me. ^ ^**


	3. Author's note

Hello, all.

After 2 years, I've finally come back to this piece.

We Are Young will be finished in 2 more chapters because I really can't work around this formatting or style of story.

I might rewrite this story in the near future though for a more satisfying two shot. Til then, thank you fro your comments and support for over the past two years. I'll finish this fic and I hope you enjoyed We are Young as much as I enjoyed writing this.

-junmilk


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